NYC 19

Open source veteran Mickos now gives bounties to hackers for identifying and helping fix security vulnerabilities. The following transcript has been lightly edited and condensed for ease of reading.   Dan Costa: All right, Marten, thanks for coming today. I think maybe the place to start—this is a fairly technical audience, but let’s explain what bug bounties are, how they work, and how much money can be made on a single bounty. Marten Mickos: Yes. Well, let’s start from the bad news. Nobody wants to get hacked and everybody gets hacked. Every consumer, every company, everybody gets hacked. But now, fortunately there are people who are fixing it, whether we are ask them to or not. We are asking them to do it, but they’ll do it anyhow. It’s the young generation, they are fixing it for all of us, because we are incapable, we bury our heads in the sand, we don’t know the crap we have created for the future generations. But they will fix it. And bug bounty is based on the idea that if you have a web app or a mobile application, then if good guys can break in, then probably bad guys can too. And if good guys cannot break in, then probably bad guys can’t either. So let’s ask the good guys to try to break in. If they break in, you can fix it, and all is good. If they cannot break in, all is good. So that’s our business. We have today 400,000 freelance hackers, security...